Edugeek.net, the support site for, er, geeks who work in education, has been brought down by Fasthosts.
The hosting service has launched its infamously glacial technical support into action, but the site has been down since Tuesday morning. Edugeek provides - when it's up anyway - free technical support and forums for admins who …

"If ever our internet connectivity fails to meet the 99.9% up-time guarantee for your dedicated server, you'll be eligible to claim a refund of one day's service fee for every hour that your server is unavailable."

Fucking ripoff, move to a different host, I've NEVER experiance such apalling service. Do what I did, threaten them with legal action (mock up a solicitor's letter) and get your year's money back.

Pay peanuts

Borked disk eh.. Good luck with that!

Took Fasthosts a whole week to even look at my DS when the disk failed. Using the remote KVM tool, I logged into the box religiously for 7 days to find it still on the same page of the BIOS where I'd left it. They're a useless bunch alright.

Shame I didn't have The Register to bring them to action. I'd wager your site is up sharpish after it's mention here :-)

move your hosting quick

Inside Fasthosts -

Curious internal structure, attended an interview there some time ago for a role in front line support. Failed miserably.. I was under the misconception that front line support was there to resolve run-of -the-mill tech support issues. It's not, it acts merely as means of checking the human beings username and password against account details before passing the fault report up to second line. About twenty of them man the phones on the cramped upper floor built into the roof space during the day, on nights just a couple of very bored lost souls handle the calls. BTW the aircon is frankly not up to it.

On the plus side if you can accept the job involves the mindless chanting of the service level agreement to distraught customers then the take home pay is quite good and they do look after the deskbots [sorry employees] The coffee rooms are the stuff of legend each fitted with soft drinks on squirty nozzle and an expresso machine cum bean grinder that the local Starbucks would dearly like to get hold of.

Shame the rest breaks are not actually long enough to enjoy a good mug full.

@Whats the difference between Fasthosts and a bucket of Poo Poo ?

So who can we trust to do a better job of hosting?

I think most people agree that Fasthosts have some quality of service issues, but who should we be using as our primary website host? (MS SQL + ASP/.Net)

Perhaps it's worth paying a bit more for better service, but with so many different hosting companies out there, how do we know which one to choose? Google tends to find negative user feedback for.. well.. everything.. since typically more people will write up their bad experiences over their good ones.

We're back!

Still there?

You mean they're still in business? What kind of stupid fools are still paying them for their incompetence? Do you mean to tell me that a site hosted FOR geeks can't lead by example and find a real hosting company? I sure wouldn't go to that sort of site for "advice".

@jon

I too went for a job interview at Fasthosts after I was made redundant elsewhere. Was told that I was over qualified for the job, the interview was a group interview I initially thought I was a shoe in as the people I was with hadn't a clue about IT. Maybe the others got the job which explains everything.

Also true about the top floor office, I mentioned it was a little warm and was told they were working on the air con....much like their service

Re: who do you suggest?

I've used ThePlanet before, and found them pretty decent:

http://www.theplanet.com

Though they're not perfect (they recently had a fire in a data centre, covered on here), their support was always first rate. i.e. generally clueful about *nix and responsive within a few minutes. (a *real* 24 x 7 operation)

However, last used them in depth over 18 months ago, so it wouldn't hurt to double check. :)

The difference?

Re: So who can we trust...

Well, it's not very fashionable to admit it, but I've only had two hours' downtime in 7 years from 1&1. I pay £8.99 plus vat per month, and I have more disk space and bandwidth than my measly 35,000 visits/month site could ever need.

@Whats the difference between Fasthosts and a bucket of Poo Poo?

Faster than a speeding lama.

read their support contract

It really is a case of getting what you pay for and FH's contract pretty much says they will try to provide the service, but bad luck if they can not and you just have to wait out any issues they may have.

Even when I have requested 'paid for' support it takes days, even weeks before someone is available.

Very very dissatisfied soon to be ex-customer (migration takes time!)...

Eukhost.com

Leave if you value your business

Dealt with them for 3 years as a reseller and are complete amateurs from management to the help desk. They are the worst company (IT and non-IT) I have ever had to deal with. I suspect like most companies the problem is in management and it filters down to all levels within the company. I thought they would have gone under after the last few disasters but looks like they're still there causing their usual havoc on people - amazing.

My suggestion is if you are running anything that you deem critical/important and cannot afford down time of a week or more (this is the sort of down time you can expect from FH when they have their wobblies) then move to a proper hosting service. I bit the bullet and moved to Rackspace. Expensive definately but their customer service and ability is an example to all companies (IT or Non-IT), I think you get what you pay for. I have not had one problem and customer service is fantastic. I value my business and would not risk with amateurs like FH. If it is a non-business website I'm not sure who I would recommend but anyone other than FH would be better.

Hosting provider.

Since people are asking about reliable hosting, I've used 5quidhost (www.5quidhost.co.uk) for the past year and a half and they appear to be reliable. I say "appear to be" simply because I haven't done anything to test their capabilities - my site is neither high-availability nor high bandwidth. I can tell you that they answered my email queries promptly, and they do seem eminently capable of meeting the needs of non-business and hobby sites. They don't sell domain names, and the reference in the FAQ to possibly doing so in the near future has been there for the past year and a half at least. I bought my domain name from www.virtualnames.co.uk, which also appears reliable and answers emails promptly.

We're Suing Them - but will they get the message?

We had some significant outages over a ten month period and now we're suing them for every occurance because their "Xtreme Support" was extremely silent and never ever got back to us unless we spammed them. Needless to say, they failed in their uptime guarantee for dedicated servers on each and every occassion (we had a 5 day outage on one occassion and it was just a disk failure). You should be able to get them for the monthly rental, time, inconvenience, loss of business (present and future).

If everyone sues them rather than putting up with it, they might just get the message. The only defence that their Director of Customer Experience, Jolyon Ryall, could submit was "we...feel that we have made reasonable efforts to ensure prompt resolution of the problems reported".

By the way, we now use dedicated servers supplied by HostingUK - and their systems are very reliable and their customer service is just excellent - albeit a tad more expensive. But then, you get what you pay for I guess - we learned the hard way!

I'm posting anonymously because we are still in legal proceedings at this time!

Taking the money

'What kind of stupid fools are still paying them for their incompetence?'

We didn't. We were going to leave this year (after the passwords fiasco) but I woke up one day in May to find another whole years worth of dedicated server hosting had been removed from the EduGeek bank account by them without my permission or any reminders being issued, and they have steadfastly refused any refund as they wave their SLA at us (incidentally, it says 'we've got your cash now bog off you oik', so we have had to struggle on with them whilst we get some more cash together.

I would like to thank all the comanies who contacted us offering hosting, co-location and other services during this past week though. It's restored my faith in hosting companies (a bit).